Dreamcatcher Read Online Free Page B

glance she throws back over her shoulder is the kind you’d give to a dog that might bite if it got off its leash. She is very glad she won’t be riding up to Frye-burg with him. Pete doesn’t need to be a mind-reader to know that, either.
    He stands there in the rain, watching her back out of the slant parking space, and when she drives away he tosses her a cheerful car-salesman’s wave. She gives him a distracted little flip of the fingers in return, and of course when he shows up at The West Wharf (at five-fifteen, just to be Johnny on the spot, just in case) she isn’t there and an hour later she’s still not there. He stays for quite awhile just the same, sitting at the bar and drinking beer, watching the traffic out on 302. He thinks he sees her go by without slowing at about five-forty, a green Taurus busting past in a rain which has now become heavy, a green Taurus that might or mightnot be pulling a light yellow nimbus behind it that fades at once in the graying air.
    Same shit, different day, he thinks, but now the joy is gone and the sadness is back, the sadness that feels like something deserved, the price of some not-quite-forgotten betrayal. He lights a cigarette—in the old days, as a kid, he used to pretend to smoke but now he doesn’t have to pretend anymore—and orders another beer.
    Milt brings it, but says, “You ought to lay some food on top of that, Peter.”
    So Pete orders a plate of fried clams and even eats a few dipped in tartar sauce while he drinks another couple of beers, and at some point, before moving on up the line to some other joint where he isn’t so well-known, he tries to call Jonesy, down there in Massachusetts. But Jonesy and Carla are enjoying the rare night out, he only gets the baby-sitter, who asks him if he wants to leave a message.
    Pete almost says no, then reconsiders. “Just tell him Pete called. Tell him Pete said SSDD.”
    â€œS . . . S . . . D . . . D.” She is writing it down. “Will he know what—”
    â€œOh yeah,” Pete says, “he’ll know.”
    By midnight he’s drunk in some New Hampshire dive, the Muddy Rudder or maybe it’s the Ruddy Mother, he’s trying to tell some chick who’s as drunk as he is that once he really believed he was going to be the first man to set foot on Mars, and although she’s nodding and saying yeah-yeah-yeah, he has an idea that all she understands is that she’d like to get outside of onemore coffee brandy before closing. And that’s okay. It doesn’t matter. Tomorrow he’ll wake up with a headache but he’ll go in to work just the same and maybe he’ll sell a car and maybe he won’t but either way things will go on. Maybe he’ll sell the burgundy Thunderbird, goodbye, sweetheart. Once things were different, but now they’re the same. He reckons he can live with that; for a guy like him, the rule of thumb is just SSDD, and so fucking what. You grew up, became a man, had to adjust to taking less than you hoped for; you discovered the dream-machine had a big OUT OF ORDER sign on it.
    In November he’ll go hunting with his friends, and that’s enough to look forward to . . . that, and maybe a big old sloppy-lipstick blowjob from this drunk chick out in his car. Wanting more is just a recipe for heartache.
    Dreams are for kids.
    1998: Henry Treats a Couch Man
    The room is dim. Henry always keeps it that way when he’s seeing patients. It’s interesting to him how few seem to notice it. He thinks it’s because their states of mind are so often dim to start with. Mostly he sees neurotics ( The woods are full of em, as he once told Jonesy while they were in, ha-ha, the woods) and it is his assessment—completely unscientific—that their problems act as a kind of polarizing shield between them and the rest of the world. As the neurosis deepens, so